SEO Mentor

In my very first Monday Interview Podcast I had the opportunity to talk a bit with my good friend Jordan Kasteler aka Utah SEO Pro. I think of Jordan as an authority in the search and social media communities. So listen to my interview podcast with Jordan and get a sneak peak of what he will be speaking on in some of the upcoming conferences and get some real gold nuggets to help with your SEO!

If you would rather read then listen here is the transcript of the interview:

Garrett: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Monday interviews. I’m Garrett Pierson, Your SEO Mentor, and I’m here with Jordan Kasteler. Hey, Jordan.

Jordan: Hey everybody. Hey, Garret. How are you doing?

Garrett: I’m good. Today we’re going to be interviewing Jordan and getting into his mind a little bit. Jordan is a good friend of mine. We met almost eight months ago, wasn’t it?

Jordan: Yeah, I think; actually, maybe more.

Garrett: Yeah, it could have been. We’ve just kind of developed a friendship. I think of Jordan as an authority in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketing industry and really want to pick his brain for my listeners.

Jordan, could you tell us more about yourself, for some of my listeners that don’t know you?

Jordan: Sure thing. My background; I started off as a web designer/web developer at about the age of 13 or 14. I just really loved it as a hobby and started working as a web designer after high school at an ad agency when I was 18. They were teamed up with this SEO company. This SEO company was called Engine Ready, run by Jason Miller. He taught me a lot of SEO things. That’s how I first got my introduction to SEO. I wasn’t really in love with it at the time.

I later worked as a web designer in house for a real estate and mortgage company. They wanted to get their sites ranked. I said, “I know a little bit about it.” They said, “Take two or three weeks, immerse yourself in SEO, and come rank our sites.” So, I did. For those couple weeks, I spent all my time learning all I could. I got their sites ranked and fell in love with SEO. It was a connection ever after that.

I went to work for an SEO agency after that, called WI Works. I worked there for about three years and just recently made a shift to Overstock.com as an in house SEO specialist.

Garrett: Wow. That sounds like a lot of accomplishments, a lot of things that you’ve done.

Jordan: It’s been a long, fun road.

Garrett: Let’s get onto some of the main questions here, Jordan. What are some of the things you really enjoy about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the industry and in your career?

Jordan: The things I enjoy about the industry is that it’s so friendly; everybody in the industry. I have yet to meet somebody I don’t like – honestly. I am usually a pretty spiteful person. Really, everyone is just very friendly. It’s a really great community. You have Sphinn; that’s a really great community. I just really love this industry.

You go to a conference like SMX or SES and everyone is very friendly. You get to know these people like they’re your best friends. That’s what I really love about search engine marketing, at least the community.

What I love about search engine marketing is that it’s so diverse. You can work for yourself, at home, for a large corporation, or a small agency. You can do work for a small business, a large corporation, ecommerce sites; you can really do whatever you want. To have that option to bounce around; if you get bored it’s a great option. There are not a lot of careers that offer that. That’s what I really love about search engine marketing. It pays well to because of supply and demand. It’s an overall good place to be right now, in this day and age.

Garrett: Great. So, if you could give one gold nugget of advise to somebody that’s coming into the industry, what would it be?

Jordan: How about three gold nuggets; read, test and practice. Read your blogs, follow your industry leaders and really read what they have to say. Subscribe to their RSS feeds. Read Sphinn. Read Search Engine Land every single day. Expect to spend an hour and a half to three hours, almost daily, keeping up with that stuff. Really read what’s going on. Then, take all that knowledge that you’ve learned and test it.

Test your own theories, as well as other people’s theories, and see what works for you. What works for one site or someone else that they blogged about or that you’ve read about, might not work for you. Go ahead and test things. Have some testing grounds; your own blog, your own website or whatever. You can’t always test things on clients’ websites. You have to apply what you already know to clients’ websites.

Another thing is just practice. Keep practicing. Keep going at it. Keep testing new things. Eventually you’re going to be very good in SEO.

Garrett: I like that part about testing and practicing. That was a good little nugget you gave there. Test on your own sites. You need to test and have your own sites going. Practice on your own.

Jordan: Exactly.

Garrett: Make little changes here and there and see what’s going.

Jordan: Right, because if you’re testing a client and your test fails, you have to answer to your client, after that. It’s not always a good thing.

Garrett: Very true. In your first one, you talked about reading. What are some of the blogs or authorities that you follow; just a couple?

Jordan: I mentioned Sphinn and Search Engine Land. Those are really great sources to follow.

Garrett: It’s kind of an aggregate. Sphinn aggregates all of the best.

Jordan: Exactly. If you just stuck to those two sites and just read all the content on those daily, not everything that gets submitted to the ‘What’s New’, or the ‘Upcoming’ in Sphinn, but everything that hits the front page, then, read all the Search Engine Land links every day, you’re going to cover the board pretty much. I’d say those are two really good sources.

Another one is Search Engine Watch. It has a good newsletter, called “Search Day” or “Search Cap”; one of the two. That’s a really good one to subscribe to; Searchenginewatch.com is another good one.

Garrett: For those of you that don’t know, Sphinn is Sphinn.com.

The big talk in the online world and industry when it comes to search marketing, there has been a rise of social media. What my question to you is how do you see the web changing in five to ten years, because of social media?

Jordan: Five to ten years is a very long way out. If you look at the past five years and how the web has changed since then, it’s really hard to predict how the web is going to be in five years, let alone ten. I can tell you in the next two years.

Garrett: Okay, do the next two years.

Jordan: Social media is going to extremely transform the web. We’ve already seen this happening in the past couple of years. Sites like Digg, Mixx, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook; all these sites get some of the most traffic of any of the other websites out there. They can really provide a lot of value for marketers in multiple ways.

It can provide buzz. It can provide exposure, branding, traffic, and links. Links are what every SEO wants. It’s a very good way to get out there. A lot of people are going to be toning down a bit on link building and go more to the approach of social media, using viral marketing and social media to obtain naturally accrued links and stuff like that.

I think it’s really going to change the face of SEO in general. It will be very interesting to see what lies ahead.

Garrett: That’s interesting. You talked about Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg and some of those and how these sites are getting more traffic than… It’s just crazy. I’ve been doing some research on it. Actually, people are staying on these sites five times longer than they stay on the search engine or on any site, because it’s a social community. That’s huge. Now you’ve got five times as long to catch somebody’s attention. That’s big. That’s cool.

Jordan: Exactly.

Garrett: Who are some of your favorite people, which you continue to follow online? You talked about some of the main sites, but who are some of the people and the authorities that you follow?

Jordan: I’m going to feel bad; I know I’m going to leave out a few people here. There are so many people that I follow. Just to name a few off the top of my head, and I hope this doesn’t offend anyone that I missed, and you know I follow you: Chris Winfield, he’s great with 10e20.com. He always has good posts; very smart guy. Weep Knoll, Slightly Shady, Gab Goldenberg, SebastianX is really great, Bill Slawski, Ruud Hein, Jeff Quipp, Matt McGee, David Wallace, Tamar Weinberg, Michael Gray, Rand Fishkin, the whole SEOmoz’s team, Brian Chappell; I could keep going, but those are some of the really key influencers in the industry that I always make sure to follow. They always have good things to say.

Garrett: Good content. That’s what I think. You’ve names a lot that I follow as well, and who are very interesting. They have great content. That’s what is important. I don’t think you will offend anybody. Maybe what people can do is to go to your Twitter account and see everybody you follow, and then you won’t offend anybody. It’s all there.

Jordan: Exactly. I’m following like four hundred something people. It’s a good way. Oh, I left one off of that list there. I can’t believe I forgot.

Garrett: Who’s that?

Jordan: Garrett Pierson, Your SEO Mentor.

Garrett: Thank you. What’s your Twitter account so they can go see everybody you are following?

Jordan: It’s Twitter.com/utahseopro/. Definitely don’t go to utahseopro.com. I didn’t really grab that domain, and some other SEO asshole has that.

Garrett: I heard through the grapevine that you’re speaking at SMX Local and Mobile in San Francisco?

Jordan: That’s correct. I’m also speaking at SEM Canada and SES San Jose.

Garrett: What’s the one that’s coming the soonest? Is that SMX Local?

Jordan: Yes, that’s July 24 -25, in San Francisco.

Garrett: Can you give us a little sneak peak of what you’ll be speaking about there?

Jordan: Sure. I’m going to be speaking in a session called “Cracking the Code Inside the Black Boxes of Mobile and Local Search Algorithms”. It is the very last session of the very last day. I hope people will stay for it. It’s basically about mobile and local algos and how to optimize for them.

Garrett: So, staying on that subject of local and mobile, that topic, do you see mobile devises like cell phones playing a bigger role in local search?

Jordan: Actually the correct terminology is mobile phones, to correct you there. Cell phones are the old bricks that you used; the old huge cellular phones.

Garrett: That’s probably why they call it local and mobile too, huh?

Jordan: Exactly. Eh, semantics. Anyway, mobile devices will play a huge role in search in general, as well as local. I think one of the biggest things is how they affect not just online commerce, but brick and mortar commerce too; offline commerce. You could be in a store, bust out your mobile device, and do a price comparison online with other local stores and decide whether or not you want to check out with the store you’re at, or go somewhere nearby to find a better price. I don’t know if a lot of people have really thought about how it’s going to affect offline sales, but it is. That’s something to keep in mind.

Garrett: If you could, give us all one tip, or more, about local search and optimizing websites. What would be one tip?

Jordan: The biggest tip I could give is to say make sure that both people and spiders can find your location. Make your location, your phone number and address easily accessible to humans when they come to your site. Have different pages for different locations; include maps. Make it really accessible for them to find you.

Someone on a mobile device doesn’t have the patience to be surfing around your site to find your location. They’re going to move on if they can’t find an easy way to contact you.

Spiders as well; if you want to get ranked in local search, you have to let spiders know where your site’s located. There’s more ways to do that than just geographical key words in your tags. There are things like micro formats, address tab, geo data in your Meta data that you can use.

Garrett: Would one of those be using zip codes?

Jordan: Yes it would. There is a telephone algo that you could add to your phone number to let spiders know that’s a phone number as well as allowing people to click on that, to be able to call your site.

There is a wide array of little indications that you can give, as far as your geographical region. That’s one of the things I’ll be talking about at the conference.

Garrett: Last question Jordan. I appreciate your time and effort here. Why should people attend SMX Local and Mobile and some of the other conferences that you’ll be attending and speaking at? Why should they attend your course?

Jordan: Local/Mobile is really important. That’s definitely the way search is going, aside from social media of course. As these phones are coming out with smart browsers and become more and more sophisticated like the iPhone, mobile search is only going to go up and up and up. It’s really important that you are found. Local and mobile kind of go in tandem. It’s a really important conference to attend to figure out not only why it’s important, but to figure out how to actually implement local and mobile.

During the San Jose SES conference I have to make my speech quick, because I’m going to be on my honeymoon that week. I’m going to be in San Diego. I’m going to cruise up the conference for the day, pop in, give them my speech, grab a few drinks with the boys and then head out. I haven’t really looked at all the sessions so I can’t really let you know what’s going on there. I’m going to be speaking on the benefits of SEO for businesses.

Then, at SEM Canada, I’m speaking on two different panels. But, in all honesty, I’d have to go look up what I’m speaking on. That’s all kind of one big blur now. There are two different ones.

Yeah, if you’re in Canada, definitely cruise on by. It should be a good one. There are a lot of good people there who are going to speak at that.

Garrett: Wonderful. Congratulations on getting married here soon. That’s going to be nice.

Jordan: It is. I appreciate it.

Garrett: Thank you, Jordan. Again, I appreciate your time. You’ve given us some great content and some fun. Hopefully we can hear from you in the future and see you at these conferences and around on the web. I’m sure we will. Again, thank you.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 6:46 am and is filed under Google, MSN, Monday Interviews, SEO, SEO Friends, SEO Podcasts, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Your SEO Mentor Podcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: Bill Slawski, Chris Winfield, David Wallace, Gab Goldenberg, Industry, Jeff Quipp, Jordan Kasteler, Matt McGee, Michael Gray, Monday Interview Podcast, Podcast, Rand Fishkin, Ruud Hein, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Optimization, Sebastianx, SEO, SEOmoz, Slightly Shady SEO, SMX Local & Mobile, Sphinn, Tamar Weinberg, Utah SEO Pro